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activity ceased; she organized no parties, betrayed by the incomprehension all around her. She grew to despise the good wishes of other women, oppressed by their smug equation of motherhood with fulfillment. An only child, she had wished to be the center of her marriage. Now she felt like a stray, trapped by Charles Carey’s seed in a role she did not care for. His efforts to reach her through the psychiatrist Levy insulted her: Charles did not understand that it was he who had killed her dreams. Avoiding him, she retreated, in time, toward her parents.
    They had never failed her before.
    Grant and Elizabeth Fairvoort had worshiped her from infancy, dressed her in the clothes she wished, taken her to Corfu and Mallorca. The world as she learned it responded to her touch. Told early of her own enchantment, she had come to believe the lives of others less bright without her presence. As she ripened into adolescence, she would make love to herself with her fingertips—brushing her cheeks or tracing the line of her hips—as if reflecting the admiration in Grant Fairvoort’s glance. Later, acting, she thrilled with pain she had never felt, to be rewarded by her parents’ pleasure. Even things beyond her sight or knowledge found their purpose in her happiness. She knew that her father—a ruddy, confident man with a white, perfect smile and snow-white hair—was an investment banker; she never asked what that involved. Simply and without reflection, she knew that it was done for her.
    Men became a different class of being, mysterious yet powerful, to whom she owed nothing but the acceptance of their gifts. She sought in marriage the perfection of her father’s love: now, sensing Charles’s needs, she could feel only contempt and fear, just as she had come to fear the child that she carried. It did not matter that Charles had some new trouble with his father, or that he kept picking up the telephone to try to catch the sound of strangers. She made plans to see her parents.
    As she packed to leave, six months pregnant, the Fairvoorts crashed while flying a Piper Cub to their summer home on Lake Champlain, leaving her wealthy, and without defenses.
    Nothing bad had ever happened to her until she’d married Charles.
    Deflecting his sympathy, she sleepwalked through the funeral—a rote Episcopalian service that deadened her emotions—as if through a role that bored her. The caskets were empty; her father would reappear, say how fine and elegant she looked. Then, returning home, she saw her pregnant body in the mirror, and knew that he was dead.
    With terrible finality she passed beyond her husband’s reach.
    In the last month of her pregnancy, moodily drinking Scotch in the living room, Charles heard her scream.
    He raced up the dark winding stairway to their bedroom.
    The bed was slashed to ribbons. Alicia’s shredded clothes were strewn across it, cut with the scissors that now protruded from a portrait of Charles Carey.
    He found her in the bathroom, panting as she slashed the mirror with lipstick until her naked, bloated image seemed bloody chunks of skin. He saw lipstick reflected as blood on his mouth, watched her eyes in the mirror widen with animal surprise. Then she screamed, and her fist swung forward, shattering his reflection in the glass. He grasped her wrist, felt warm blood spurting from the back of her hand. She twisted away, and then collapsed over the basin, hair falling into the broken glass, round belly heaving with her sobs.
    Levy gave her Thorazine; six days later, she gave Charles Carey a son.

CHAPTER 3
    Watching Charles sit restlessly in his office, William Levy felt the weight of Carey’s infant son.
    At Harvard, when they were freshmen, he had not imagined Charles would ever need him. Where Charles was athletic and a WASP, Levy was Jewish and awkward, envying Carey’s prep-school toughness and the girls he had, the way he drew followers by not